Topic: Education and Child Policy

“Cliff” Deal Offers “Head Start” to American Insolvency

By
Andrew J. Coulson

H.L. Mencken said that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

What we want, as revealed yesterday by our elected representatives, is to preserve and grow government spending at any cost. Well, perhaps not any cost. But certainly one specific cost: $20,000,000,000,000. That’s roughly what the U.S. national debt will be by the end of President Obama’s second term (double the figure when he took office). For context, 20 trillion seconds equal 633,774 years—three times as long as Homo sapiens has existed. That’s a lot of seconds… and a lot of dollars.

So what will we get for it? Well, as long as folks are still willing to lends us money we seem unlikely to ever be able to pay back, we’ll get to preserve federal government programs that we apparently consider sacrosanct.

In education, the most sacrosanct of these is surely Head Start, a 47-year-old pre-school program for low-income children meant to close the racial and socio-economic gaps in student achievement. So it’s interesting that on the Friday before Christmas, when many Americans including most of the media were otherwise occupied, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly uploaded a new study to its website. Well, not actually a new study. It had been completed months earlier and been given an official release date in October. But, you know how it is. It’s unseemly to release a massive, high quality, randomized study showing the failure of a signature federal education program on the eve of an election. So its release was deferred until “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” In a nutshell: it says Head Start doesn’t work.

Perhaps the last great federal spending program before the debt bubble bursts upon us in a year or a decade should be the printing of 315 million T-shirts with the caption: “I bankrupted the United States of America, and all I got was this lousy….”  Except, of course, that program probably wouldn’t work either.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Government and Politics

An Inside View of Public Schools

By
David Boaz

“In public school, they were just happy you turned in your work.”

That’s the view of high-school basketball star Josh Hart, who transferred from a Maryland public high school to Sidwell Friends in Washington, D.C., where he hoped to get more attention from college basketball coaches. Here’s more of what he said to the Washington Post:

“With the academics, it was like a whole new world where they were speaking a different language,” recalled Hart, who had transferred from Wheaton. “In public school, they were just happy you turned in your work. Here, on the second day, the teacher was talking about explicating poems and I remember thinking it was going to be a long year.”

The good news is that thanks to the help of some involved parents, Hart improved his study habits and grades and is now an all-around success at Sidwell Friends. But how well are other students being served by schools where “they were just happy you turned in your work”?

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

U.S. Government: Our “Head Start” Program Doesn’t Work

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Head Start, the flagship federal education program for low-income preschoolers, doesn’t work. That is the conclusion of yet another high quality, large-scale randomized experiment commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the program.

Like an earlier study that found no lasting benefit to Head Start by the end of the 1st grade, this new study confirms no lasting benefit by the end of the 3rd grade—after an investment of 47 years and about $200 billion.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently warned that going over the “fiscal cliff” would result in cuts to programs like Head Start. It would, in other words, cut federal education programs that don’t work—which is actually what Barack Obama promised to do on the campaign trail back in 2008. Remember when he said “I want to go through the federal budget line by line, programs that don’t work, we cut”? Apparently, neither does he.

Perhaps that’s one reason the DHHS decided to sit on this report for four years after data collection was completed, and sneak it onto the Web on the Friday before Christmas without so much as a statement. The “most transparent government in history” is transparently uninterested in anything except political expediency. Doesn’t care about your kids. Doesn’t care about your money. Just. Doesn’t. Care.

Hat tip to professor Jay Greene for uncovering the release of this study, and for promising to search out the names of the government officials responsible for burying as long as possible the proof of their own failures. 

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Newtown: A “9/11 for Schools”?

By
Gene Healy
…That’s what a security consultant told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly last week on the day of the Newtown elementary school massacre. We’ll need armed guards, “perimeter security, CCTV, preventative issues with the school psychiatrist [and] police department…” and the whole panoply of items his firm recommends. Newtown, he summed up, “is going to be for schools what 9/11 was for airports.”
In my Washington Examiner column this week, I warn that “If the reaction to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is anything like the reaction to September 11, we’re in for a decade or more of frantic overreaction and wasteful, destructive policies based on the false promise of perfect safety.” The fact is, as I point out in the column, school is one of the safest places your child can be. In terms of child fatalities, both the backyard pool and the family car are far more dangerous than the classroom. The federal government’s annual report on school violence, Indicators of School Crime and Safety notes that ”over all available survey years, the percentage of youth homicides occurring at school remained at less than 2 percent of the total number of youth homicides.”  As Daniel Gardner puts it in his 2008 book The Science of Fear, year upon year, ”a student’s risk of being murdered in school was de minimis – so tiny it was effectively zero.”   Granted, it certainly doesn’t feel de minimis, after last week’s sickening events.  It even feels callous to put the risk in perspective.  But parents shouldn’t be told their children aren’t safe, and legislators shouldn’t rush to pass laws based on that fear.  In The Science of Fear, Gardner explains that “One of the most consistent findings of risk-perception research is that we overestimate the likelihood of being killed by the things that make the evening news and underestimate those that don’t.” The “rare, vivid, and catastrophic killers” we see on 24-hour-cable news engage our primate “fight or flight” hardwiring, override our rational faculty, and tend to make us “probability blind.” But, Gardner argues, “probability blindness is itself dangerous. It can easily lead people to overreact to risks and do something stupid like abandoning air travel because terrorists hijacked four planes.” And it often, as David Boaz suggests below, spurs legislative panics that leave us no safer, but poorer and less free. 
Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General, Government and Politics

Beware the Data!

By
Neal McCluskey

Something that seems to get broad support among policy people is government collecting more data and using new statistics to “inform” the public, politicians, and researchers. After all, knowing more helps us to be good consumers, right?

Maybe, but that doesn’t outweigh the myriad pitfalls of politicians and other people having more statistics to abuse.

The biggest danger is one we should have learned about from K-12 education. The No Child Left Behind Act requires that all parents be told whether their children are “proficient” in math and reading, and whether their schools are making “adequate yearly progress” toward all kids hitting proficiency. The only problem? –There are actually many, but the biggest is that most states have defined “proficiency” at levels that are, generally speaking, anything but. So parents have new information, but it is, essentially, a lie.

Then there’s the problem of cherry-picking data. Who hasn’t heard wailing over the decreasing percentage of funding for public colleges that has come from states? Seemingly anyone who wants more taxpayer dough in the Ivory Tower uses that stat to suggest that schools have had their funding “cut to the bone.” But they haven’t – for the most part other revenue sources have just grown faster. It’s not unlike complaining that your salary as a percentage of your income has dropped after winning the lottery.

Finally, there’s the problem of data being used to narrow what we are allowed to choose. Again, look at K-12 education, where there is an obsession with standardized testing. The danger is that what can easily be tested is not the whole – or perhaps even a large part – of a good education, but because it seems more concrete it is what we focus on. Indeed, East Asian nations are consistently the highest scorers on international exams, and we are warned repeatedly that we must either catch up or suffer. But in terms of economic growth and happiness – basically the two main things people hope to use education to achieve – the United States has often outshone countries that have beaten us on test scores. And many East Asian nations are trying very hard to get away from their grinding, test-obsessed systems to move toward systems that inculcate fuzzy, but real, things like “critical thinking.”

Unfortunately, the natural bias is to focus on things that you can measure and, if you are a politician, reduce to a sound bite that sounds authoritative because there is a number attached to it. But like colorful pills, data can be useful when used properly, but are also deceptively – and dangerously – innocent looking.

Beware!

Cross-posted at seethruedu.com

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Blanket Federal Discipline Mandates Reportedly Not on the Table

By
Andrew J. Coulson

I spoke today with Sen. Durbin’s office regarding my concerns over the legislative direction that his “school-to-prison” hearings might take, and was assured that federal mandates such as I feared are not in fact under consideration. Perhaps the recent introduction of other sweeping federal mandates has colored my perception.

At any rate, this is a good sign, and I hope that the Senator and his colleagues come away from their hearings recognizing that thoughtful administration of school discipline cannot be secured via mandates but rather must be achieved by giving educators the freedoms and incentives to serve the interests of children. When teachers’ and administrators’ professional futures depend on their success at keeping kids in school, helping them to realize their individual potentials, and preparing them for the challenges of adulthood, they will constantly search for new and better ways of achieving those ends. And they will find them. That is why parent-driven education markets outperform other types of school systems.

And the best thing the federal government can do to make such education markets universally accessible is to draw attention to state-level programs such as Florida’s and Pennsylvania’s education tax credits that are in the forefront of advancing them. Sometimes federal legislation just isn’t the right tool for the job.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Where Will the Senate ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’ Hearing Lead?

By
Andrew J. Coulson

The Senate hearing at which I testified yesterday, chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin, seemed designed to raise support for legislation imposing federal mandates on states or districts to curtail the use of out-of-school suspensions, to make suspension policies uniform across schools, or both.

The motivations for such legislation are understandable. Out-of-school suspensions do little to help the suspended students educationally and they are correlated with arrests and incarceration. The Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, which Sen. Durbin chairs, is particularly interested in these facts because African American students are much more likely to be suspended than whites.

But the facts do not support the kind of legislation that seems to be under consideration. Two recent and highly sophisticated studies by Rochester University professor Joshua Kinsler shed new light on the well-established trends noted above. For the first time, Kinsler factored-in between school variations in discipline policy when looking at the racial disparity in out-of-school suspensions. He discovered that, within any given school, black and white students sent to the principal’s office for a given reason are issued the same suspensions at the same rates. The disparity is all between schools.

Schools with predominantly black student bodies are more likely to issue suspensions, and to issue longer ones, for a given offense. White students at those schools get the same treatment, but most white students are in predominantly white schools that are less severe in their discipline policies. Black students at mostly white schools also get less severe punishments.

Kinsler did find that African American students were more likely to be referred to the principal’s office, which has long been seen as evidence of systemic racism.  To investigate that explanation, Kinsler looked for any relationship between teachers’ referral rates to the principal’s office and the race of those teachers and of the students they refer. He found none. This does not mean that racism plays no role, but it calls into question the view that racism is a dominant factor in referrals to the principal’s office.

In a subsequent empirical study, Kinsler investigated what would happen if all schools were compelled to observe a more lenient suspension policy, to close the black/white discipline gap. He found that this would disproportionately hurt the achievement of African American students, widening the black/white achievement gap.  The reason for this, according to Kinsler’s findings, is that serious suspensions do in fact discourage misbehavior, and that removing disruptive students from the class does improve the achievement of the other students.

Kinsler’s methodology, which jointly models discipline policy, student behavior and student academic achievement, is the most advanced I’ve seen used in this field. Unless and until his findings are found to be in error, or are contradicted by similarly sophisticated research, it would be unconscionable and counterproductive to impose a blanket reduction in suspensions on the nation’s schools.

None of this is meant to defend the cavalier use of out-of-school suspensions. As I explain in my written testimony to the Committee, there are much better alternatives and there are policies that will systematically encourage the use of those superior alternatives. I sincerely hope that Senator Durbin and his Committee do not leap before they look at these alternatives and at professor Kinsler’s findings.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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